Paint The Town Ugly: Ugly Face Wednesdays Take Over White Walls In Los Angeles

This past Wednesday was the first in a series of Wednesday night guerilla art projects taking place every Wednesday in November: Ugly Face Wednesdays, curated by Stephanie Gonot. The first projection took place in the parking lot of Vons in Echo Park, Gonot’s home in Los Angeles – on a wall that she’s been interested in using for a while now. Using a projector attached to her car battery to display 10 foot faces, observers (many of whom had submitted their own uglies to be projected) lingered in the lot, giggling, chatting and munching on tacos from Taco Zone.

Ugly Faced Wednesdays emerged from another project by the same name: Cari Vander Yacht‘s project, for which she took an “Ugly Face” picture of herself every Wednesday. 52 terrible faces on ridiculous backgrounds, Cari dedicated a year to making absurd, terribly unattractive faces, which she described on her Flickr as “the best/worst thing I’ve ever done.” Gonot discovered the project in September and decided to bring the ugly to Los Angeles, a town of decidedly beautiful creatures.

Despite going in without distinct permission for the project from Vons, the projection went off with very few hitches – at one point, a parking lot light came on, dimming the images on the wall. At another, a Vons shopper parked in front of the projection machine. These hiccups only added to the event’s guerilla charm.

Gonot is a photographer and a curator in Los Angeles. In September, she organized an exhibition of portraits, I Like Your Face, which took over Pehrspace for an evening with snacks and music by Emperor X. She has also organized a Cash and Carry art show through the photoblog she curates, “Please Excuse the Mess,” benefiting 826LA. Her own work has recently been featured in two exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Wandering Bears at the Margate Photo Festival and New Contemporaries at Pistol & Fur Gallery. This week, her photo-remake of Wayne Thiebaud’s Girl with an Ice Cream Cone was posted as part of BOOOOOOOM.com’s photo-remake project.

Ugly Face Wednesdays are scheduled to take place every Wednesday night in November in different locations around Los Angeles. Stay tuned to the project tumblr to submit your own ugly face and find out where the next projection will take place! For more on the event, be sure to check out their Tumblr.